Rambling, rumbling, rumination

Faction Raids

Just a quick set of questions that I’ve somehow never thought of before now:

If factions (specifically Horde and Alliance) are so important in WoW, why are raids not faction specific?

Why can anyone at the endgame go to any raid?

Do Alliance raiding parties and Horde raiding parties really stand in line outside a dragon’s door, waiting patiently at a shot at the Big Bad, while their sworn enemies are within spitting distance?

Why doesn’t Blizzard use faction specific raids to pad out the playtime even more than they already use alts?

What exactly would be the benefit if faction-specific raids were installed? (Or even race-specific or mini-faction-specific, say an Argent Crusade Onyxia raid vs. a Dragonflight Onyxia.)

I’m not talking here about midgame instances, I’m talking specifically about a set of unique remixed raids at the “endgame” to extend content use even more. They may simply be riffs on each other, like Onyxia hanging out in the Sunwell or something like that, giving the opportunity to create new tactics to adapt to new circumstances. Sort of a “Caverns of Time in a Blender” approach.

Thoughts on a stressful Friday, brought to you by sleep deprivation and inquisitive minds.

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14 Responses

“Do Alliance raiding parties and Horde raiding parties really stand in line outside a dragon’s door, waiting patiently at a shot at the Big Bad, while their sworn enemies are within spitting distance?”

On PvP servers, they often slaughter each other. Not sure how it is at the moment but outside Karazhan used to be a warzone in TBC.

Given the complaints that only a small percentage ever got to see the raids anyway, I would never have suggested making them even more exclusive.

Contrarily, I always wondered why, when the raids are typically against enemies of both factions, raids couldn’t have been the one time where the two could come together to fight a common enemy ie. Alliance and Horde players in the same group/raid cooperatively.

As has been noted for the past five years, WoW took the “war” out of Warcraft…

I don’t really understand the faction split in WoW. Ok, I mean I understand it… but why can’t the two factions group and communicate together on normal PVE servers? It’s part of the lore for Pete’s sake! Both factions joined forces to take down the Scourge! Yet in game we have to stand and look at each other like dumb muppets.

Pre-Wrath, Kara could still be a war zone even on our PvE server. All it took was one person to be flagged. You’d get a couple of people decide to coordinate a hit, several Guildies would come to the first player’s defense, and suddenly everyone’s jumping in. It beat standing around twiddling your thumbs waiting for people to arrive, and was a lot more exciting than dueling.

Spinks, Cap’n, thanks, I’m obviously not a raider. It’s sort of good in a strange way to hear that the factions still duked it out while waiting in line. It seems like that was part of the fun of having factions at war in the first place.

Scott, on the surface of it, yes, faction specific raids would be more exclusive, but remember that I’m all about getting everyone into all of the content, probably via dynamically scaled raid difficulty. In that context, if I were to actually flesh this out into a game design proposal, I’d actually be wanting to get more people into raids, but use the faction identities to make them more interesting and strengthen the faction lore. (Including cooperative ventures, as you rightly note.)

…if the faction split is still important, anyway. That this comes up at all suggests that it isn’t. 😉

Oh, and yes, I approve of the incoming ability to switch factions, I just want it to mean something in the lore. People change allegiances all the time in real life, for better or worse *coughWarrenSpectercough*, so I don’t see a good reason to make the factions impermeable, but I want to make them to have better identity to make the choice to switch more interesting. Maybe that means EQish betrayal quests or something like that.

Spitfire, I might just have to appropriate the “dumb muppets” line at some point. It’s so… fitting for these characters sometimes.

When I used to raid (WoW 1.x), our raid team had to gather at a predefined location and head off to the instance in a 40-man blob. If we trickled in, the Horde would corpse camp members of the raid for an hour or so.

I always loved hearing the squeals when people would try to get into BWL or MC back in the day when they were PvP flagged (I’m on a PvE server, unfortunately) and were slaughtered as they ran to zone in.

On my PVE server, the summoning stones are often the site of some nasty fights. The stone at Naxx is especially brilliant for that, since it’s in that tiny little room. All it takes is one person flagging, then everyone else risks accidentally clicking on the flagged person and setting off a big fight. Warlocks being able to summon their little closets has pretty much ended it now though, sadly.

Actually, Blizzard is a faction-specific boss into the upcoming Argent Coliseum, so they’re backpedaling a bit on their previous “all content should be accessible by everyone” dogma, which led to them abandoning class quests and homogenizing many of the quests in TBC and WotLK. Of course, in this case they are compensating by making only eight different armor sets (faction- and armor type-specific) instead of ten (one set per class). However, it’s an improvement over Sunwell, where they only made four sets in total.

Blizzard is very big on putting content in the game that EVERYONE can see. Therefore, I doubt their views would be favorable for content that only 1 side gets to see, unless of course they do it like they’re doing 3.2 where you enter the same instance, but the bosses (1 encounter in this case) is different depending on what faction you belong to.

Now, having said that, another game that’s been designed using the methods we’ve described in the past could make very good use of faction to have different encounters that you can only see when you’re in good favor with that faction.

Personally I’m not all gung ho with everyone being able to see everything at any given time. I like the idea of rewarding people being faithful to a faction or having the tenacity to boost up so many factions in a game (given that the “boosting” methods aren’t simply grinding).

Wiqd, as long as these MMO things are static beasties, I’ll champion everyone being able to see everything, even if it means scaling dungeons, faction and class changing.

Now, if they change to more dynamic worlds where things change every day, it’s inevitable that you’d miss something just because you can’t play 24/7. That’s the nature of the game; life moves on, and there is no rewind button. In that case, I’d have no problem with faction specific raids, or even time-specific raids, and indeed, they could be used to make the world even more interesting and make “faction faithfulness” relevant, as well as give a sense of history, since things happened, and won’t happen again. And most of all, you can *make* things happen that won’t happen again.

Well I meant I’d advocate not everyone seeing the content if a dynamic game was built. I understand the need for it now (since you’d have like half the content if you left it as is and incorporated faction restrictions, which would force people to reroll just to experience it).

But yea, new game, dynamic game, always evolving, always changing. The key is to make people not WANT a rewind button. You need to give them a world that feels alive so if they miss something, it’s not like “Aw man!”

Indeed. That’s another reason to give people power to be the prime movers in the world, so that anyone can always feel like they can go out and make a difference, rather than always be waiting for the Godots of the game world to make Big Things happen.